They only removed the chair from the paraphernalia of my kingdom and made the bed; before going to sleep I restored some pebbles dislodged from their frontier. When I closed my eyes at the center of the territory edged by pebbles I noted the silence surrounding me, a silence tinged by a silence different to the quiet absence signaled by the snow’s silence: I no longer heard the adults still wandering around the house or the noises that preceded the footsteps and echoed in the huge bell-jar of night…At the center of a territory invented by chance in a game I managed (finally!) to escape the painful darkness that closed in around me.
The pedigree stones cared for me by silencing the house throughout the night so I might sleep. The pure habit (of the sounds) woke me in the early morning. The house was silent. I got out of bed and left my pebble boundary: the noise was there as usual, the steps and the sea-shell echo of fear continued their tireless activity. I jumped on the small island of silence and, in bed and happy, I closed my eyes. My nightmare had found its cure.
On subsequent nights, as you can imagine, I placed the white pebbles around my bed. I forgot everything else: cleaning my teeth, taking my work to school, putting laces in my shoes, answering question number four (or whatever) in an exam, but I never forgot my redeeming nightly boundary. I enjoyed myself in my paradise of silence, I let myself go like any girl in the simple pleasures of childhood, I changed tens into eights and sevens in my school notebook, dared to go to my girlfriends’ houses if I was invited, and noticed how nobody at home was curious about my pebble boundary. Every morning, the cleaning maid swept them up and threw them in the trashcan. I was the only one they mattered to.
For a few days plucked at random from the calendar we three girls went to Cuernavaca, to a hotel described by Esther as delightful, called Los Amates because there were a couple of those enormous trees in the garden. A man called Don Alfredo managed the hotel, I never heard or have simply forgotten what his surname was. The waiter who served us in the restaurant was called Primitivo, the rooms were small and uncomfortable, and despite the boiler the pool was never even lukewarm, but Esther was happy conversing interminably with the master of the hotel.
Don Alfredo wrote poems. One was to the weeping willows that could be seen from the terrace, others to the village where he had lived as a child. He’d been married to a Jewish woman, had separated (nobody ever said divorced in my house) at some time or another. He’d had a daughter by her who must be (or so Dad reckoned) more or less Esther’s age.
My sisters and I ran on the grass, played cards, snakes and ladders, Monopoly, went in and out of the pool…did everything we could to break the thin veneer of tranquility over the place. The hotel never seemed to have guests. At night, although I alerted my practiced ear, like a bell in the darkness, only the wind could be heard, when there was one.
Nothing ever happened in Los Amates. That was guaranteed and that’s probably why Esther chose it (underestimating the importance of her friendship with Don Alfredo). Nothing happened, nothing ever happened. Even the sun which at midday elsewhere in Cuernavaca seemed to burn down in a searing shaft of light, here its rays were bland, soft, askew, apparently fortuitous. But those three days a character turned up who was a stranger to our world, a girl Malena’s age but already a woman, and I mean a woman gone rotten, not a mature woman: sad and perfumed like an overripe fruit, her eyes painted as if they’d spent more than enough time in front of the mirror, she smoked and her tender thirteen-year-old body wore her womanly attributes like trophies (I don’t mean the trophies of big game-hunters but trophies as in atrophied parts): her breasts, long legs, waist, which at thirteen still hadn’t taken shape, corresponded to those of a slightly overweight woman, not the uniformity befitting a girl’s body. She wanted the world to believe she was a frustrated woman, when she was in fact rather a frustrated girl, a girl not kissed or caressed by her mom. (In the hotel parking lot I heard people say “She’s the drunkard.”) Over with before she’d grown up, she seemed to be searching: in fact she didn’t want to find anything because she thought there was nothing to find, not even death.
One midday I went over to her while she was painting her nails irritably, like a woman bored and overfamiliar with the routine. I looked closely at her hands, muttered something or another and saw hands covered in varnish and her carelessly painted nails: she dabbed here and there, never quite hitting target.
“What are you doing?” I asked her.. “You’re not doing it right.”
She stared at me, her beady eyes seemingly unable to focus on anything.
“Do you know what my name is?”
“Yes.”
“And you do know what word’s like my name, don’t you?”
I didn’t dare say no. Now, as I can’t remember, it doesn’t mean anything to me. Then she told me a joke about Christ on the cross and the Mary Magdalene woman doing something I didn’t understand, and I didn’t realize it was supposed to be amusing, and after laughing and forcing me to laugh with her, that look that transfixed me (a mongrel’s, a roach’s, a shitty fly’s), she said: “What do you know? You shouldn’t even be asking me why I paint my nails that way, or can’t you guess?”
If I didn’t dare confess to her that her joke hadn’t passed through the window of what my parents called my innocence, I did confess I didn’t know why she made such a mess of painting her nails. “Don’t you get it, or what?” She answered that it was — I can’t remember the word she used— to deceive, so her hands couldn’t be recognized, or that’s what I understood, and I asked:
“Why don’t you want to be recognized?”
Then she took hold of both my wrists and, pulling me toward her, raised her right hand and placed it on my girlish nipple, pushing aside my swimsuit to touch my skin. Gently pinching my nipple, she told me on the mouth, mouth to mouth, like a kiss of words: “I’m doing what I can to be saved.” She separated herself from me.
My swimsuit strap had slipped off, I looked down and saw on my breast the red mark of nail varnish, over my heart, a new — brutal, painful — stigmata. Not one I wanted to preserve. I threw myself into the water and swam till no trace was left on my breasts of the red welt of pain left by her rough caress.
At the time the road from Mexico City to Cuernavaca seemed endless. Now, looking back, I realize it was short and easily definable. On that occasion when I traveled back, with Esther driving and the three of us happy to be going home, we all four sang while I thought: “What was she trying to tell me? What must she save herself from?” I took the mirror from Esther’s handbag and looked at my face: dark eyes, clean skin, a face not like hers. Should I paint my nails?
I asked Esther: “Hey, Esther, will you paint my nails when we get home?”
“Little girls don’t paint their nails.”
“I don’t know if they do, Esther, but I want to paint mine.”
“It’s not right.”
“It’s just…”
“No.”
When Esther said “no” she managed to convince us more efficiently than any authoritarian mother, without making us lose face. “It damages the cuticles. And looks ugly. The varnish doesn’t allow the nails to breathe. It’s uncomfortable. It looks cheap. No.”
And I said with her: “No, I shouldn’t paint my nails.”
As soon as we got home, I persuaded Malena to come and collect more pebbles from our neighbors’ window box. I say persuaded because they were tired of the pebbles, and infatuated with a microscope for which they spent hours and hours gutting and slicing all there was to gut and slice and the stones, as they weren’t looked at through a microscope, were no longer of interest.